|
|
| A museum cannot buy viewers Raitis Šmits, Artist, Curator Conversation with Peter Weibel, the director of ZKM, Center for Art and Media | |
| The ART+COMMUNICATION festival for new media culture will be particularly significant this year as it will bring to Riga, Latvia a very special international academic event: Media Art Histories 2013: RENEW – the 5th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology. The exclusive rights for organizing the event have been granted to the RIXC Centre for New Media Culture in Riga. RIXC artist Raitis Šmits has invited one of the conference honorary chairs – Peter Weibel, the director of ZKM, Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany to provide readers with a small insight into conference themes – from the rapid development (and out-dating) of technologies in media-based art to the specific role of media art in the broader picture of art history. | |
 Peter Weibel. 2013 Publicity photos | |
| Raitis Šmits: You are a very well-known artist, but you are also a curator, you have been writing theoretical texts and you have been the director of ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe for more than a decade. Could you briefly explain the role of a museum nowadays? You have been writing about museums as a theorist, but maybe you can answer the question from the perspective of ZKM? And can you divide yourself between being a director and an artist when it comes to dealing with the perspective on museums? Peter Weibel: I think when somebody is a head of an institute of mathematics, he is a mathematician himself. The director of an institute of physics is a physicist himself. When you are responsible for a hospital, you are a doctor of medicine. A head of an institute in a specific field is always someone who works in this field professionally and who has education or competence in it as well. Another example – Shakespeare was a writer and he led his own theatre. The arts is the only field which is separated from this idea. In arts, you have people who are directors of museums who cannot write, who cannot curate and who are not artists. They are managers, art historians or even something different. It shows for me what Marx called the division of labour. And from my point of view, it shows how conservative the field of art is. Normally, people think that art is a very progressive field and we do have many progressive members on the art scene, but if we look at the art field from a structural, institutional perspec- tive, it is not so. If I would look at the legal structure of a museum or the contacts that a museum director has or the power he has over his collaborators and his curators – I see the laws of feudalism of the 16th century. In fact, it is even worse. In a feudal system you could complain about your “boss”, but when you complain about the boss in a museum he will most likely fire you, and any criticism within the institution itself is almost impossible. You can criticize it from the outside, and here we have a whole movement called Institutional Critique – we do not have it in physics and medicine and mathematics because these fields do not need it. But in art we do need Institutional Critique because art institu- tions are still very conservative due to the division of labour, or we could say that it is the effect of alienation. It is suggested that in a social state, art is alienated from all society. I try, in my position as a museum director, as much as I can, to fuse art and society, by using my knowledge as an artist. Today, when a scientist puts forward a solution, for instance, in quantum physics there are maybe twenty people in the world who can judge whether it is correct or not. So physics and mathematics is a very strongly advanced field and only committed people play a role in it. In the arts, everybody can speak about art. In the case of the Poincaré conjecture this was not so. But it is not just the division of labour. Also, when we look back at the 1500s and the example of paragone – artists were not even able to explain what paragone is, because it was not an accommodation between painting and sculpture, it was an accommodation between science and art. At that time there were trees of knowledge and the highest branches were theol- ogy, then came philosophy, writing, etc. And at the very lowest end, on the lowest branches in the tree – was Artes Mechanicae (the mechanical arts). Also, artists were pretty universal guys, for example, Leonardo Da Vinci studied anatomy, science, he was an engineer, knew how to make bridges, weapons etc. And he was unsatisfied with the fact that art was the lowest in the hierarchy of knowledge. He set out to do something about it and to establish art higher in the hierarchy. He was most proud to be a painter, so when he compared all the arts – poetry, music, architecture, sculpture and painting, he said that painting was the superior art form. He said this not to compete with others, but to suggest that if some artists can rise up to the level of science, then it can be called painting. This was said in his 1595 writings ‘The Science of Painting’ because he did not want to accept that we artists are alienated from the construction of the modern world. So this problem is very scientific. When you collaborate with scientists, and whenever you make art related to space radio or networks it is very scientific, because it is very technological. When you are doing technological or media art, you have to have some knowledge. Through media art and technology-based art we have a tendency to go back to this Renaissance paradigm – that we artists are able to compete with science, with knowledge and that we are not just expressing our feelings, emotions, etc. in whatever we do. If you look at works of scientists like Maxwell, you don’t find one single sentence that they conduct experiments to explain feelings or emotions. They have a scientific goal to find out what either light or matter is, etc. This spirit of an experimental system comes back to art through media-based art and technology-based art. So this has been happening for only a short period. During the Renaissance, artists made their works not because of inner necessity, but because they were commissioned. In a world where rich people or the church gave commissions, you had to have a very high level of craftsmanship because of competitors. And you had to grow with your craft and your com- petence for the competition. A signature was an expression of competence: there was a point to make a claim that “this work is by me because I am the only one who can do it”. The aristocracy fell, and art as a field where you could receive commissions fell apart. After the Industrial Revolution the artist became a free entrepreneur and he had to go to the market. The free market was the beginning of the freedom of art. You had the salons which you could attend to sell your work. And when somebody asked an artist why he paints and brings his 20 paintings a year to the salon, he would say it was because of the inner urge. One of my favourite artists, Vermeer, never wrote that he wants to express himself, that he wants to express his emotions and that it is an inner urge. He had scientific interests to explore the nature of light, similarly as Faraday was exploring electromagnetism. Before that, people went to the artists, instead of the artist having to come to them. The market put forward the idea of the psychological individual who has to express his emotions, and it is a condition of the market. Today we have to look for new commissions and the role of the museum could be that of a commissioner that invites artists. This, for instance, is what we do at ZKM. We should not wait for products to be offered to us on the art market. There are museums which have all the same stock (all the same artists) and they are the image of the art market, but the museum should become a part of this experimental system of research, etc. There are artists who do not work with mass media and for journalists. They do not create blockbusters, so they do not need to please the press or the public. Here in Germany, museum curators conducted demographic research on the quintessential artist that German people like the most. It turned out to be Marc Chagall, and to please the public and to get many visitors, they chose Chagall. The same research was done on what the journal- ists would want the artist to be, and, as it turned out – it was Jeff Koons, because he is a brand. The way that they think is: if I write about a brand, then maybe my magazine, too, is branded. So today we have brand-artists, celebrity culture artists, we have brand collectors and brand museums. There are journalists who write about these artists and they are part of this game. It is a system of mental corruption, where real art is turned against celebrity culture. When you are a mathematician and when you are a physicist your field is your aim, not celebrity status, even when you can become famous. Art has become a medium of fame and money, to the point where it is not so important to society. One example, why do museums have to say how many visitors they have had, like television about its viewers? There is a famous science institute here that was the biggest centre for nuclear research, and afterwards – the biggest anti-nuclear research. It has 3000 scientists and researchers, and it costs millions. Do politicians expect a science institute to tell them how many visitors they have had in the past year? Scientists have no visitors at all, because they are seriously respected. When art starts to go after this, it is a kind of self-destruction, and you always have to think about what the public wants to see. So mu- seums are not necessarily art centres, they might not even know the field. When you are a mathematician, you read an article and you see there a solution to a problem which is new. If you are not a mathematician, you would not know if the article is good, because you have not had the necessary training. Also, only in the arts can artists say – this is a new solution to an old problem, or we have discovered a new problem, like in mathematics. In my situation, I am in fact proud that I have the competence as an artist to become a good museum director, but this applies only as long as I am a good artist. There might come a time when I will be no longer happy, because I will not have the competence to discover what is new. Then I will have to resign from the position of museum director. R.Š.: Before we turn to the problem of media art archiving, the one major problem that I think we have to deal with is to attempt to change the paradigm in the arts, since new media arts have not yet been recognized as part of the contemporary art system in a way. Because of that, there are probably other problems, including the archiving problems as well. P.W.: Media art is the greatest challenge to the classical arts. Until the 1900s, the problem in short was that art was a medium of representation. A picture or a sculpture represented what we can see, hence, the shape and form of visible things. This was representation by the means of art. As Da Vinci wrote is his book, painting is a science which has the duty to represent the world, the shape of visible things with the means of painting like a dot, a line, light, shadow, volume and plane. There is a painting by Kandynski called From a point to a line to a plane which is also the title of his book. He singled out the means of the painting but said that none of this can represent the world. People call this abstract art, but it is also representation; it is a representa- tion of the means of representation. Kandinski had the same means, but he did not use them to represent the real world anymore, rather to represent the means. However, in 1913 when Malevich made his Black Square, Duchamp made his bicycle so this was also a time when the real object came into art. Not only artists didn’t want to represent the world, they wanted to show the object as it is, a self-representa- tion of an object. In that sense, modern art is a total illusion: it is not beyond representation, it is a self-representation, a self- representation of means and a self-representation of an object. Artists took something and made it into art by rejecting its func- tion as, for instance, Man Ray did in the artwork Cadeau (Gift) by gluing nails onto a flat iron. These are visual objects but they have only a symbolic function, instead of a use-function. In art you had started to substitute representation with reality. We went from painting landscapes to making land art. Eve- rything that was painted before was substituted by real things. And then suddenly came media art which was not abstract, and which did not treat the object as an object. It did not trouble the real world. In my opinion, media art came with the idea that art was never a question of representing the world, but instead – it was the question of constructing the world. We construct with our brain what we see. This was a different, and I would say – a better proposition of how to solve the problem. Suddenly, art gained a different branch on the tree of knowledge. The dominant movement of abstract art and object art did not like media art. It was not abstract and it was not about the object, but it came back to what art was really about. With the help of artistic means – not only brushes, but synthesizers or radios – it rep- resented or investigated our time with the means of our time. This follows what was said by Seurat, who is considered to be the scientist of the Post-Impressionists, he said: “I think it is real to represent our time with the means of our time”. He said this wonderful sentence about his work, although in his time there was only photography. And today we have even more means. With media we expand the universe of artistic means. This is the most important act of civilization. We do not leave all this new technology to the military and we are doing a kind of re-civilization, we make individualization or personalization possible. Artists are individualizing this new strange technical environment which is difficult to control. For an artist as a painter the promise was to be able to make pictures of the world. But now, that would be just old-fashioned, because it would not be explaining our society. In the technological epoch, to make a picture means to show how we construct the picture, to make a model of how the world functions and to make it evident. Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus wrote that a sentence is like a picture that represents the real world. It is tragic that conceptual art was based on this false idea. Later on, Wittgenstein opposed himself by saying that the meaning of a sentence is its use. Hans Reichenbach said that the meaning of a sentence depends on the method of verification. A different method of verification will provide another output as to what is true or not. So the truth value is not a part of the sentence, it is part of my method of verification. In media arts we do not say that pictures are the images of the true world. Our methods of verification are cameras, monitors, etc. and we make them evi- dent all the time. We, the media artists, and not abstract artists or object-artists, are the only ones who are going beyond the method of representation. We have replaced representation by reference. We refer to other sentences, to other measures, etc. In fact, classical art has taken over this method. Andy Warhol took images from gossip magazines and mass media, so he was referring to mass media, but he was not a painter anymore. And Gerhard Richter also does abstract paintings, but he is referring to the media of abstraction: he takes photographs, makes them out of focus and turns them into paintings. Nobody painted out of focus before photography. All the famous painters today rely heavily on the media but they hide this fact by making media the “illegitimate children”. There was a book by Pierre Bourdieu Photography: A Middle-Brow Art – painting, sculpture and photography all become media. R.Š.: I would like to ask about the museum as a traditional institution of collecting and representing art, and also about Web 2.0 – you have discussed these issues. If Web 2.0 is a virtually and endlessly expandable archive which does not use selection principles for providing and archiving data, who are the users or beholders who use the Web 2.0? What is their role and possibilities as content providers? Do they keep reproducing the same clichés all the time? I think it is necessary to make a selection in order to find out the value. Isn’t it, abstractly speaking, the role of the mu- seum to make the selection? Or to set the value system, even in the time of Web 2.0? Museums probably won’t become obso- lete and alienated from society, despite the increasing number of people who post their pictures etc. online and who are complaining that we do not need museums any more. How to deal with this situation and this problem of mass media? P.W.: You described the problem correctly. Not only is this a problem of media, but a problem of democracy and mass media channels. The beholder has a chance to become a content provider but if he is not an emancipated beholder he will repeat what others have told him, instead of finding his own voice. The famous problem of democracy is that it can only function if it has an emancipated author or citizen, but this can only be produced by the democracy itself. People who grow up in an authoritative system do not have a rational voice for analysing what is going on, and their intelligence is almost silenced. They can become victims of populism and do what powerful charismatic leaders tell them to. Sometimes there is no guarantee that democracy functions, even if the process of democratic voting actually takes place (like it was in the 1930s, when people democratically elected a dictator). This means that democracy already depends on an emancipated author, emancipated citizen – a kind of phantom that does not exist. Therefore we have to defend democracy every day anew. Some people say that democracy does not exist. Some believe that democracy still has to come, which is obviously a kind of chosen messianism. But if people are not civilized, they will not act democratically. To get the product afterwards, you need the circuit before – which is difficult. It is the same for the museum and the beholder or the visitor. When they are not educated, they will go for the worst product. How do you emancipate them if they do not take a chance? You would think that the web is a good place for emancipation, but what we have seen are platforms where amateurs meet to provide little pieces, depending on their taste. Professional producers would not provide such a product, be- cause quality is more important to them: professionals cannot compete as amateurs. Unfortunately, the web made possible the opposite of what we had hoped for. How can a museum overcome this paradox? What I do here is I to focus on interactivity, education and emancipation. And strangely enough, this is not a lost case, although we do not provide entertainment, because we do not want to compete with the cinema. I try to offer them here a different view on the world, so when someone comes here, he or she learns something that was not known before. And this is still enough. The problem is mass media journalists and even art journalists. They want to go after what we could call celebrity or brand artists. When there is a chance to write about somebody who is not known or a brand artist, the journalist will choose the latter because it will sell more. When you have a review magazine with unknown artists, you won’t sell it. Thus journalists always prefer not to write about art but about the next thing close to art – which is the real danger, and mass media itself is the real accomplice of cor- ruption, not the audience. R.Š.: Regarding the issue of media art preservation, would it be possible, in your opinion, to borrow strategies and maybe even some methods for media arts archiving from other fields, for instance, from technology museums or archaeology muse- ums? P.W.: I think we could learn from the theatre and opera. When you have a work from the Korean media artist Nam June Paik with old TV sets, you can buy thousand old monitors when tubes fail and replace them, because the TV is a sculptural ele- ment in the case of Nam June Paik and you cannot showcase a piece by Nam June Paik with flat screens. But it is not possible to buy so many TV sets, not even Nam Jun Paik could do that himself. They do not exist anymore. So, after several decades, you will be unable to show Nam June Paik at all. Then we have to do what in the arts is called “re-enactment”, or you can go a step further, like theatre and opera, and re-stage the work. In theatre you have the original play script by Shakespeare, but every time a new character makes it different and it is never the same opera or the same theatre with different costumes, different stage set etc. People still recognize it as Shakespeare because of the text and the idea. Theatre makes a magic illusion to make people think that this is Shakespeare, even if 60% of the text is origi- nal and 40% is new. Nowadays people are talking about what is called “loyalty to the work” and they use the original, full-length text, but still it is not the same text it was 400 years ago. But opera shows that you can re-enact and re-stage anything. We call it transponding: when you have the software and you have to set it up on different hardware. Unfortunately, there comes a time when you as a curator have to do a re-interpretation of an artwork because it is not possible to show the original anymore. We have photographs or videos of the work to know what it looked like. R.Š.: Does it also mean that in fifty years’ time we will have works by Nam June Paik as sculptures of these old, dead TVs and we will also have reinterpretations with new means? P.W.: Definitely. And then the people will decide, who is the better interpreter of the installation. So years later we will obviously have new interpretations of one piece. R.Š.: This kind of already answers my next question: when we deal with digital works, we can have two identical works in two museums. With time, after having gone through different migration cycles, we will be able to see artworks at various museums that will be slightly different. P.W.: Exactly. This is precisely what I hope for – for this kind of divergence. It is different than with painting, because it always explains that the artwork which you can see at a museum is the only real one. We can say the opposite: that there exists no true Mona Lisa but we can show you different interpretations. With Nam June Paik, there might be a work where you will only see the hardware and not the actual artwork functioning. In twenty other places you will see different interpretations that will be a functioning work. This is a future that I like. Media art is different from painting, it is quite the opposite. It gives the freedom that theatre or opera already have. R.Š.: It also deals with the medium, it shows the nature of the medium. P.W.: Exactly. For example, we will never see the ballet as it was in the bourgeois theatres in the 1920s. We see people trying to imitate it but it is not really interesting. It is more interesting to see directors interpret it again, and we are used to it, we accept it. The art field, not the artist with museums and with collec- tors becomes very conservative because we stick to the concept of an original work. In the art world there is a real ontological conspiracy with the need to keep one single object, but with media it will not be possible. R.Š.: I briefly examined the online materials from the symposium of the project “Challenges of Digital Archiving”. There I could see two very radical positions. One suggests con- serving just the essential part of the work like the source code, and the other – to collect as much as possible, including the documentation of the work. P.W.: This is my position: I try to find and collect as much data for each work as possible. And I think that the archiving problem today is a problem of pick-data. When we make decisions now on what data is important or interesting – we may make mistakes, should there be a different point of view in the future. We can make mistakes deciding what data should be suppressed. I cannot say what the future will be – if I could, it would be the future already. At the moment, people perhaps may not be able to see what could be different about an artwork. When you suppress information now, it is like killing the future. We cannot even make a decision on what is a good work and what is not. Thus we come to a position that we call pick-data. If I wanted to do a project and to collect data on works by ten million artists, people would say that I’m crazy. But why am I crazy? We do this in science, where there is no ontological conspiracy with, for instance, ten million cancer patients, so we have as much data as possible. But we will come to a question – what to do with this data? We have to find an interesting angle so that this data can provide a new perspective, because in the arts so many people repeat what has already been done by others. When I go to an exhibition, 40% for me is déjà vu – I have already seen it. For example, at the last documenta exhibition there was a piece by French artist Pierre Huyghe. It was a sculp- ture of a woman in stone and its head was covered with bees. Nowhere was it mentioned that there was a piece by another artist, Adelbert Heil, who had already done a piece with bees on a head many years ago. When there is a good collection of pick-data, you can immediately see if a work is an original or ac- tually a nice variation. Without this information you could make a great mistake, not knowing what has existed before. So when a work that we do not know comes in, the data bank could show if it has had variations previously. Then the hierarchy would be different and the emulation would be different. Since we know that memory is severely limited, we need extensive data banks in the name of justice – this is the point. And we need art to be- come more just. We cannot victimize art to this kind of vandal- ism, therefore we need pick-data archives. R.Š.: I see this also in relation to the fact that contemporary art markets need a new celebrity all the time, and it does not matter that their artworks are similar to works that have been created ten or twenty years ago. There is no general strategy where to go with this knowledge like you described with the huge database. It could also add to the strategy in developing knowledge one step further. P.W.: Exactly, it is an instrument of knowledge. When you have data on ten million paintings it is an instrument of knowledge. For example, when Jeff Koons came up, a famous critic Pavel Büchler wrote an article where he called him an Andy Warhol imitator. Normally we would not let him grow to become such a star. Later, when Koons became famous and powerful, the critic erased this sentence and suddenly said that Koons is a good artist. He knew that if he would stick to this, the other members of the art circle would write him out. This is the power of the market: if people criticize something, they may have to change their opinion. R.Š.: Regarding the audience and the artwork, do you see a contradiction here – in participatory art in general, and in media and interactive art in particular, artists (and this is my interpretation) try to put the audience at the centre of the artistic process. But if we look at the traditional museum approach and what museums themselves declare – they put the artwork in the centre. How can these contradicting positions somehow coexist? P.W.: There is a nice hidden paradox: the introduction of participation happened in the line of substitution of reality in art. As I said before, in modern art everything that was represented became real. And at the end, even the spectator became real. So modern art produced the real existence of the spectator, but it fights against it. Earlier, the only real existence was to the artwork: an artist put a model on canvas by using a brush, and the model became real. Later, the artist started showing himself as real. But slowly, through happenings, the public became a part of art. So at the end of this line of substitution of representativity modern art arrived at the real audience, producing the spectator and inviting him to participate – which was a good thing. At a Tinguely exhibition, you could even take an artwork home and destroy it. However, under the pressure of the art market, modern art refused to take the spectator seriously. New media stood up to this and said that even the work does not exist if the spectator does not act. This was a step too far for the ontological conspiracy of modern art. It could accept that someone takes the artwork and does something with it, but it could not accept that the spectator became very important for the artwork itself, and the focus was suddenly shifted from artwork to spectator. R.Š.: The market collapses then in a way. P.W.: The market cannot buy spectators (laughs). This is why so many critics and art restorers, and even artists, deny participatory art which is a basic thing of media. You cannot be a participatory painter or sculptor. Only with digital and media art especially do you have the chance to be an active participating public. ZKM is a museum of participation. If a museum is against it, then it is apparently against democracy because democracy is about participation. Why not be a museum or an art form which shows what democracy is about? This is why you see confusion in art when artists like Jonathan Meese – a German sculptor and painter – goes so far as to say: we are against democracy. We want the dictatorship of art! Then he is still the boss, not the spectator. They are fighting fiercely. Also, you can see what the directions of the market are. Even with a top artist like Bruce Nauman, on the market you can only see his sculptures and not his media works. No interactive art work has ever been sold at the auction market because this is what curators hate. There has been much debate on media art imitating film and television. Vezzoli did a piece for the Biennale, and he took Sharon Stone, who played Hilary Clinton, and the famous philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy – he played Bill Clinton. They imitated a three minute piece of advertising propaganda for the presidential election. This was sold immediately, because it has the format that looks like television and it features Hollywood stars. When media art imitates television and film, this is what curators like. It is the same with photography because it is similar to painting. There is a German photographer, Andreas Gursky, who is creating much hype right now, because you can hang his photographs on a wall like paintings. | |
| go back | |
